Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are utilized in many of the world’s most powerful cloud-based systems. Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft are among the many corporations working on projects to simplify and grow the potential of AI and ML applications.
For many enterprises, utilizing ML and AI in their cloud-based applications remains a challenge. Coding is a particularly tall hurdle to overcome, as the talent pool of developers with the know-how to utilize these technologies effectively remains small.
In a recent blog post, Google Chief Scientist of Cloud AI Fei-Fei Li and Head of R&D Jia Li announced a new service from Google available to its cloud users called Cloud AutoML.
“Currently, only a handful of businesses in the world have access to the talent and budgets needed to fully appreciate the advancements of ML and AI,” they wrote, “To close this gap, and to make AI accessible to every business, we’re introducing Cloud AutoML.”
The goal of Cloud AutoML, according to the blog post, is to assist business with limited ML expertise to work on their own applications utilizing the technologies. In essence, it would give less-experienced developers the ability to learn and develop AI applications.
AutoML Vision
AutoML Vision is the first service Google is releasing for AutoML. It features a drag-and-drop interface for uploading images, training and managing models, and deploying trained models directly to Google Cloud.
“Early results using Cloud AutoML Vision to classify popular public datasets like ImageNet and CIFAR have shown more accurate results with fewer misclassifications than generic ML APIs,” Li wrote.
Using this tool, developers can upload photos to train the Cloud AutoML Vision application to recognize patterns and identify objects. All of this occurs in a GUI interface with no direct coding required. Once the model set is trained, the developer can deploy them directly to the cloud and put them to use in their applications.
The post featured the following perks of the new service:
- Increased accuracy: Cloud AutoML Vision is built on Google’s leading image recognition approaches, including transfer learning and neural architecture search technologies. This means you’ll get a more accurate model even if your business has limited machine learning expertise.
- Faster turnaround time to production-ready models: With Cloud AutoML, you can create a simple model in minutes to pilot your AI-enabled application, or build out a full, production-ready model in as little as a day.
- Easy to use: AutoML Vision provides a simple graphical user interface that lets you specify data, then turns that data into a high-quality model customized for your specific needs.
Competing with Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure
Google isn’t the first cloud service provider to offer pre-trained AI tools to its Cloud customers. Both Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon’s AWS services offer similar solutions.
At recent count, Google carried a 12% market cloud market share against AWS’ 62% and Azure’s 20%. With AutoML, Google hopes to convince more companies interested in AI and ML applications to give Google Cloud a second look.
Cloud computing provides alternate ways to access essential banking technologies- giving banks access to a highly secure mission-critical system without the need for significant internal IT resources and expensive infrastructure of their own.